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.MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 108MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 109Today we would call such pretentious do-gooding a wickedsort of “cultural genocide.” Yet contemporary advocates of state-sanctioned bilingualism err when they claim that assimilationistswish to destroy knowledge of Spanish.The problem, instead, isnot that our aliens know two languages, but that often they are notliterate in even one.What, then, did we actually learn in school that so quicklyhelped all of us assimilate—or rather, what made the other fortystudents in our homeroom class of 1961 become more like us sixAnglos than we like them? Take our lessons on the Civil War: Weall were told that thousands of Americans had died to end slavery,an evil institution that was as old as civilization itself.We admiredthe romance and pluck of the South, but concluded that its causewas inseparable from slavery and so morally wrong that it had to beended—if need be, through bloodshed.Americans, it seemed, couldbe terrible to one another, but eventually there were more good thanbad people, who could use a wonderful system to eradicate man’ssins.The “North” or the “Union” was presented as the spiritualpredecessor to our own efforts to get along and overcome race inthe turmoil of the early 1960s.Our class often sang “Battle Hymnof the Republic”—with a heavily accented Mexican English.We all got the message of racism, slavery and oppressionclear enough while still learning something of Grant and Sher-man and Jefferson Davis.I don’t think we needed to be told thathumans were imperfect—how else could the Constitution of theUnited States have tolerated slavery for nearly a hundred years? Wehad all seen the demons within our very selves out on the Darwin-ian playground and knew that their exorcism was the work of allgood citizens.Even in rural California of the 1960s, “racial preju-dice” was stigmatized as a great sin, something “unfair” that gave“advantages” to those who had not earned them.“You’re preju-diced” was a charge whose sting was the assertion that one wasdishonorable rather than merely bad.Jimmy Hall was the class racist with a strong southwestern
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